Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

[dredd]

The idea is to produce some quality literature like the following:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

The rules:

1. Each entry must consist of a single sentence but you may submit as many entries as you wish.
2. Sentences may be of any length (though you go beyond 50 or 60 words at your peril), and entries must be "original" (as it were) and previously unpublished.
3. Surface mail entries should be submitted on index cards, the sentence on one side and the entrant's name, address, and phone number on the other.
4. Email entries should be in the body of the message, NOT in an attachment. If you are submitting multiple entries, please include them in one message (and it would be really swell if you submitted your entries in Arial 12 font).
5. Entries will be judged by categories, from "general" to detective, western, science fiction, romance, and so on. There will be overall winners as well as category winners.
6. The official deadline is April 15 (a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories). The actual deadline may be as late as June 30.
7. The contest accepts submissions every day of the livelong year.
Wild Card Rule: Resist the temptation to work with puns like "It was a stark and dormy night."
8. Finally, in keeping with the gravitas, high seriousness, and general bignitude of the contest, the grand prize winner will receive . . . a pittance.

Some examples:

I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?

A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary's cheek onto the sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach Harbor, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing facilities.

 Anyone entered this before? I'd have bash at it myself, but I don't write so good.


Main page: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
2006 results: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2006.htm

[sick as a pike]

Here are mine that I'm just about to submit:

1) “Quick get out of that warehouse,” shouted Jake, “because those drums of paint are oil, not water based and thus likely to explode in the intense heat from the fire” he added, worried that the fire might ignite the paint in the warehouse.

2) The room was dark like the inside of a pack of cigarettes if you were a mouse and could get inside such a thing, except Sergeant Wolfowitz didn’t squeak, was lactose intolerant and owned a torch, which he turned on.

3) A single arrow arced high above the verdant forest spliced in twain by the river fed by virgin snow high above on mountains that rose from the plain in which the river lay, aimed unerringly at the usurping Prince, but missed and hit Alison Cramer from Leeds.

4) Lorna had a neck like a swan’s; curved and elegant, delicate yet strong, beautiful and pale, plus donkey’s legs and a face like a bee.

5) Ragli, son of Rigni, Master of all The Lands West of the Sea and Rightful Heir to the Crimson Throne gazed contented to the limpid Horizon, one thought only troubling his noble brow: why did Pecans bring him out in Hives?


edit: lactose intolerant, idiot.

[Banana Woofwoof]

4) Lorna had a neck like a swan’s; curved and elegant, delicate yet strong, beautiful and pale, plus donkey’s legs and a face like a bee.

*splurts tea*

Supoirb!

[Notlob]

Seconded, the face like a bee thing made me harrumph embarrasingly loudly.

[mook]

Hmm, them is good. Ever thought about taking that lark up for a living Pikey?

[biniput]

He flashed down the hill, left then right, to evade his captors while thinking about how to avoid the trees riding a Morris Marina bonnet.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

At the Department of English, San Jose State University, college ball linebacker/Bulwer-Lytton contest judge DeShawn Bahoodie pondered whether the current entry he was judging was a general, detective, science fiction, or a romance, though he was tired and he wasn't making much progress with his decision.

[wherearethespoons]

The grey haired aging rock icon stood in the PC World queue clutching his faulty computer.

[Jack Shaftoe]

I third pikey's bee entry.


Elgin the Black moved panther-like through the dark palace corridors, except no panther could hold a sword, also Elgin wasn't on all fours (although he nearly was on the stairs, which were quite steep, but in the end not that steep) and the 'Black' bit of his name referred not to any colouration, but to the seriousness of his deeds, and his real name wasn't even Elgin, it was 'Trig'.

[sick as a pike]

Thanks people for liking things.  As is ever the case the one I liked best of my own (#3) isn't the one other people like.  I think the bee one is too much of a 'joke,' rather than the stuttering near non-sequiturs of the original Bulwyer Lytton style.
I got a reply from the competition organisers this morning asking me to send in some more, which was nice of them.

[Neville Chamberlain]

1) “Quick get out of that warehouse,” shouted Jake, “because those drums of paint are oil, not water based and thus likely to explode in the intense heat from the fire” he added, worried that the fire might ignite the paint in the warehouse.

That one was my favourite :-)

This is actually surprisingly difficult. I've had a couple of goes myself but they've always sounded crap (in a so-crap-it's-actually-genuinely-crap way).

Make some more, Mr. Pike!

[Jack Shaftoe]

I thought 3 sounded like the start of quite a good story, and thus rejected it as unsuitable...

[Robot DeNiro]

As the murky pond sucked down the bejewelled orb, Amphibi-Man leapt into action, his battle cry "Strength of a beaver, stealth of a mollusc!" echoing from the rusty upturned shopping carts that had been left there the previous Wednesday.

[Neville Chamberlain]

"Not even the fact that Chelsea was on her sixth ASBO and was due to attend court on charges of being involved in a happy-slapping incident on a 12 year old child with Down's syndrome could dim Roger's love of her."

[the midnight watch baboon]

Holding the cheetah cub, Arkin rose, careful not to spill his furry load onto the rough, dry cous-cous like rug that grandmother Hilton'd had made to specific, mad requirements.

[Neville Chamberlain]

"After failing to boil his morning egg properly, Bradley suspected his day couldn't get any worse. He was right. It didn't."

[Robot DeNiro]

On a romantic tip...

"So that was your Earth emotion 'love'," gasped Zyxwlyxgwr Noopar, third in line to the holo-throne of S-6, as he hosed down his trunk and removed the shallots.

"Touch me," she smouldered, "touch me in all my secret places, all the places I long to be oi! not there you pervert."

[Craig Torso]

1)  At the exact same moment that he stumbled across the oasis, rising out of the desert like a mole made of water from the ground, after three weeks of walking in the desert, Hernandes, his own long lost twin brother and Keeper of the Hoard, realised that what he really wanted was a diet coke.

2)  As the alarms blasted emergency warnings at regular, steady beats that Sharon associated with parts, though not all, of Mahler's 9th, her dying brother told her to escape the airbase as soon as possible but she was in no hurry, The Simpsons would be on in a few minutes and Channel 4 were halfway through the seventh season.

3)  I left a note for Shapiro and got a plane to the other side of the country, then immediately got on another that took me to the other side of the world, then another to the other side of that country and then another to the other side of the world but I was back in my office before he had even had a chance to read the note.

[Catalogue Trousers]

The adrenochrome hit my brain like a charging, snorting boar spurred by a spear in its hairy flank, fear and fury in one uncontrolled, uncontrollable rush, an extra-terrestrial invader in curdled Viking splendour kicking in the frail doors of my medulla oblongata, setting ablaze the straw roof of my cranium with greedy joy, raping the poor screaming drudge of my cerebellum for an encore...too much artificial head-fuck in one real head-space.

[Goldentony]

I awoke to a chorus of loud crashing and screams, and only one thing crossed my mind, one horror that i had prepared myself for all these years, or at least i thought i did. Suddenly i was faced with it, i wanted to turn away and wretch my guts onto the pavement below in a billowing cloud of mucus, phlegm and bile, but i couldn't turn away. I couldn't turn away from the fact that....I HAD FORGOTTEN TO TAPE THE THE BILL.

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

I'm not sure I get this...




Grandad was born in Newcastle, the city of hooligans, on an ever so slightly queazy kind of day, a day a bit like when you close your eyes for too long on a dodgy and rather dangerous looking carnival wurlitzer, only he didn't open his eyes - he was stillborn.

[Phil_A]

As award-winning jockey and international playboy Greg Studman returned home to his luxury apartment in the south of France, he suddenly found himself sinking to his knees and letting forth with an unheard cry of the purest horror, his agonised ejaculation of misery bouncing across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the curtains, the blood-soaked, still-warm body of his dead wife, and then in some curious fashion into his own ears and mouth.

[Robot DeNiro]

"So," James the trainee optometrist said askingly, "you're telling me that Hitler is still alive and he's living in Delaware and he's built a giant weather machine and now he's going to make it rain every St Patrick's Day from now until doomsday unless I can do something that will stop him doing that (within forty-eight and a half hours)?"

[CaledonianGonzo]

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery, walking straightly upright but then staggering slightly as he approached the beautiful painting of the masterpiece the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, which had a special place in the hearts of all knowledgeable art lovers and had hung for years in the grand hallway of the Louvre, the renowned museum in Paris, the capital city of France, of which he was the justly respected curator.

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own but from which part of his body he could not say, as it didn't smell like his hands or feet and instead had a gamey tang, smoky on the palate, which he associated with the sex games he’d once played with a distinguished symbologist and this dawning realisation caused him to worry, suddenly  alarmed, whether it was his own balls singeing in the hot wires as he tried to shag the slot of his switched on toaster.

[actwithoutwords]

Oliver McAdoo, chief-commandant of the earth's defensive forces, standing on the roof of the City Hall flanked by his phalanx of personal bodyguards, along with the elders of the defensive council, surveyed a scene which formed a horrific vista of death and destruction, while the countless rotting corpses of both human forces and the horrific remains of the invading Thropulans caused a stench that nagged at his senses as he calmly composed in his head the victory speech he would give to the remaining human survivors over what was left of the internet that evening and struggled to fight off a persistant and rapidly flourishing semi.

[Robot DeNiro]

BUMP!

I've just had an email telling me that my entry quoted below is a runner up in the science fiction category.

"So that was your Earth emotion 'love'," gasped Zyxwlyxgwr Noopar, third in line to the holo-throne of S-6, as he hosed down his trunk and removed the shallots.

It's an old and obvious gag really, but I guess someone liked it.

[sick as a pike]

And I've just noticed I got a "Dishonourable Mention" in the purple prose category for-

The car headlights were pale--like a struck match viewed through a piece of smoked glass which you think you remember using to watch a solar eclipse around the time Alison and the children were still living here, which would have been the year before you got the job at the all-night bakery, twenty humid summers ago--because the alternator was faulty.

[Neville Chamberlain]

^^^

Holy shit, that's brilliant!

(either that, or I've completely lost it)

[sick as a pike]

Full results here